from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back here writer jeff rick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios you know kind of continuing our leadership coverage reaching out to the community for people that we've got in our community to get their take on you know how they're dealing with the Kovach crisis how they're helping to contribute back to the community to to bring their resources to bear and you know just some general good tips and tricks of getting through these kind of challenging times and we're really excited to have one of my favorite guests he's being used to come on all the time we haven't had them on for three years which I can't believe it sabi Mehta the CEO of true SATA founder to say to obby I checked the record I can't believe it's been three years since we last that down great to see you Jeff there's well first of all it's always a pleasure and I think the only person to blame for that is you Jeff well I will make sure that it doesn't happen again so in just a check-in how's things going with the family the company thank you for asking you know family is great we have I've got two young kids who have become video conferencing experts and they don't teach me the tricks for it which I'm sure is happening a lot of families around the world and the team is great we vent remote at this point almost almost two months ago down and can't complain I think their intellectual property business like you are so it's been a little easier for us to go remote compared to a lot of other businesses in the world and in America but no complaints it'll be very fortunate we are glad that we have a business and a company that can withstand the the economic uncertainty and the family's great I hope the same for the queue family I haven't seen Dave and John and it's good to see you again and I hope all of you guys are helped happy and healthy great I think in we're good so thank you for asking so let's jump into it you know one of the things that I've always loved about you is you know really your sense of culture and this kind of constant reinforcing of culture in your social media posts and the company blog post at true SATA you know celebrating your interns and and you really have a good pulse for that and you know I just I think we may even talked about it before about you know kind of the CEOs and leadership and and social media those that do and that and those that don't and you know I think it's it's probably from any kind of a risk reward trade-off you know I could say something group it versus what am I getting at it but really it's super important and in these times with the distributed workforce that the the importance and value of communicating and culture and touching your people frequently across a lot of different mediums and topic areas is is more important than ever before share with us kind of your strategy why did you figure this out early how have you you know kind of adjusted you know your method of keeping your team up and communicating absolutely like I guess I owe you guys a little bit of gratitude for it which is we launched our company and you know I'm showing a member on the cube it was a social media launch you know if you say that say it like that I think there are two or three things that are very important Jeff and you hit on all of them one is the emphasis on information sharing it becomes more important than times like these and we as as a society value the ability to share a positive conversation of positive perspective and a positive outlook more but since day zero at the seder we've had this philosophy that there are no secrets it is important to be open and transparent both inside and outside the company and that our legacy is going to be defined by what we do for the community and not just what we do for our shareholders and by its very nature the fact that you know I grew up in a different continent now live and call America now a different continent my home I guess I was it's very important for me to stay connected to my roots it is a good memory or reminder that the world is very interconnected unfortunately the pandemic is the is the best or worst example of it in a really weird way but I think it's also a very important point Jeff that I believe we learned early and I hope coming out from this is something that we don't lose the point you made about kindness social media and social networking has a massively in my opinion massively positive binding force for the world at the same time there were certain business models it tried to capitalize on the negative aspects of it you know whether they are the the commercialized versions of slam books or not so nice business models that capitalize on the ability for people to complain I hope that people society and us humans coming out of it learn from people like yourself or you know the small voice that I have on social media or the messages we share and we are kinda in what we do online because the ability to have networks that are viral and can propagate or self propagate is a very positive unifying force and I hope out of this pandemic we all realize the positive nature's of it more than the negative nature's of it because unfortunately as you know that our business models built on the negative forces of social media and I really really hope they're coming out of this are positive voices drown out the negative voices that's great point and and it's a great I want to highlight a quote from one of your blog's again I think you're just a phenomenal communicator and in relationship to what's going on with kovat and and I quote we are fighting fear pain and anxiety as much as we are fighting the virus this is our humble attempt to we'll get into what you guys did to help the thousands of first responders clerks rockstars but I just really want to stick with that kindness theme you know I used to or I still joke right that the greatest smile in technology today is our G from signal FX the guys are gonna throw up a picture of him he's a great guy he looks like everybody's favorite I love that guy but therefore signal effects and actually it's funny signal FX also launched on the cube at big data a big data show I used to say the greatest smile intact is avi Mehta I mean how can I go wrong and and what I when I reached out to you I I do I consciously thought what what more important time do we have than to see people like you with a big smile with the great positive attitude focusing on on the positives and and I just think it's so important and it segues nicely into what we used to talk about it the strata shows and the big data shows all the time everyone wanted to talk about Hadoop and big data you always stress is never about the technology it's about the application of the technology and you focus your company on that very where that laser focus from day one now it's so great to see is we think you know the bad news about kovat a lot of bad news but one of the good news is is you know there's never been as much technology compute horsepower big data analytics smart people like yourself to bring a whole different set of tools to the battle than just building Liberty ships or building playing planes or tanks so you guys have a very aggressive thing that you're doing tell us a little bit about is the kovat active transmission the coat if you will tell us about what that is how did it come to be and what are you hoping to accomplish of course so first of all you're too kind you know thank you so much I think you also were the first people to give me a hard time about my new or Twitter picture I put on and he said what are you doing RV you know you have a good smile come on give me the smile die so thank you you're very kind Jeff I think as I as we as you know and I know I think you've a lot to be thankful for in life and there's no reason why we should not smile no matter what the circumstance we have so much to be thankful for and also I am remiss happy Earth Day you know I'm rocking my green for Earth Day as well as Ramadan Kareem today is the first day of Ramadan and you know I I wish everybody in the world Ramadan Kareem and on that friend right on that trend of how does do we as a community come together when faced with crisis so Court was a very simple thing you know it's I'm thank you for recognizing the hard work of the team that led it it was an idea I came up with it you know in the shower I'm like there are two kinds of people or to your you can we have we as humans have a choice when history is being made which I do believe I do believe history is being made right whether you look at it economically and a economic shock and that we have not felt as humanity since the depression so you look at it socially and again something we haven't seen sin the Spanish blue history is being made in in these times and I think we as humans have a choice we can either be witnesses to it or play our part in helping shape it and coat was our humble tiny attempt to when we look back when history was being made we chose to not just sit on the sidelines but be a part of trying to be part of the solution so all riddled with code was take a small idea I had team gets the entire credit read they ran with it and the idea was there was a lot of data being open sourced around co-ed a lot of work being done around reporting what is happening but nothing was being done around reporting or thinking through using the data to predict what could happen with it and that was code with code we try to make the first code wonder oh that came out almost two weeks ago now when you first contacted us was predicting the spread and the idea around breaking the spread wasn't just saying here is the number of cases a number of deaths and know what to be very off we wanted to provide like you know how firefighters do can we predict where it may go to next at a county by county level so we could create a little bit of a firewall to help it from stop you know have the spread of it to be slower in no ways are we claiming that if you did port you can stop it but if he could create firewalls around it and distribute tests not just in areas and cities and counties where it is you know spiking but look at the areas and counties where it's about to go to so we use a inner inner in-house Network algorithm we call that Orion and we were able to start predicting where the virus is gonna go to we also then quickly realize that this could be an interesting where an extra you know arrow and the quiver in our fight we should also think about where are there green shoots around where can recovery be be helped so before you know the the president email announced this it was surrender serendipitous before the the president came and said I want to start finding the green shoes to open the country we then did quote $2 which we announced a week ago with the green shoots around a true sailor recovery index and the recovery index is looking at its car like a meta algorithm we're looking at the rates of change of the rates of change so if you're seeing the change of the rates of change you know the meta part we're declining we're saying there are early shoots that we if as we plan to reopen our economy in our country these are the counties to look at first that was the second attempt of code and the third attempt we have done is we calling it the odd are we there yet index it got announced yesterday and now - you're the first public announcement of it and the are we there yet index is using the government's definition of the phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 and we are making a prediction on where which are the counties that are ready to be open up and there's good news everywhere in the country but we we are predicting there are 73 different counties that ask for the government's definition of ready to open are ready to open that's all you know we were able to launch the app in five days it is free for all first responders all hospital chains all not-for-profit organizations trying to help the country through this pandemic and poor profit operations who want to use the data to get tests out to get antibodies out and to get you know the clinical trials out so we have made a commitment that we will not charge for code through - for any of those organizations to have the country open are very very small attempt to add another dimension to the fight you know it's data its analytics I'm not a first responder this makes me sleep well at night that I'm at least we're trying to help you know right well just for the true heroes right the true heroes this is our our humble attempt to help them and recognize that their effort should not go to its hobby that that's great because you know there is data and there is analytics and there is you know algorithms and the things that we've developed to help people you know pick they're better next purchase at Amazon or where they gonna watch next on Netflix and it's such a great application no it's funny I just finished a book called ghost Bob and is a story of the cholera epidemic in London in like 1850 something or other about four but what's really interesting at that point in time is they didn't know about waterborne diseases they thought everything kind of went through the air and and it was really a couple of individuals in using data in a new and more importantly mapping different types of datasets on top of it and now this is it's as this map that were they basically figured out where the the pump was that was polluting everybody but it was a great story and you know kind of changing the narrative by using data in a new novel and creative way to get to an answer that they couldn't and you know they're there's so much data out there but then they're so short a date I'm just curious from a data science point of view you know um you know there there aren't enough tests for you know antibodies who's got it there aren't enough tests for just are you sick and then you know we're slowly getting the data on the desk which is changing all the time you know recently announced that the first Bay Area deaths were actually a month were they before they thought they were so as you look at what you're trying to accomplish what are some of the great datasets out there and how are you working around some of the the lack of data in things like you know test results are you kind of organizing pulling that together what would you like to see more of that's why I like talking to you so I missed you you are these good questions of me excellent point I think there are three things I would like to highlight number one it doesn't take your point that you made with the with the plethora of technical advances and this S curve shift that these first spoke at the cube almost eleven years ago to the date now or ten years ago just the idea of you know population level or modeling that cluster computing is finally democratized so everybody can run complicated tests and a unique segment or one and this is the beauty of what we should be doing in the pandemic I'm coming I'm coming I'm quite surprised actually and given the fact we've had this S curve shift where the world calls a combination of cloud computing so on-demand IO and technical resources for processing data and then the on-demand ability to store and run algorithms at massive scale we haven't really combined our forces to predict more you know that the point you made about the the the waterborne pandemic in the eighteen eighteen hundreds we have an ability as humanity right now to actually see history play out rather than write a book about it you know it has a past tense and it's important to do are as follows number one luckily for you and I the cost of computing an algorithm to predict is manageable so I am surprised why the large cloud players haven't come out and said you know what anybody who wants to distribute anything around predictions lay to the pandemic should get cloud resources for free I we are running quote on all three cloud platforms and I'm paying for all of it right that doesn't really make sense but I'm surprised that they haven't really you know joined the debate or contribute to it and said in a way to say let's make compute free for anybody who would like to add a new dimension to our fight against the pandemic number one but the good news is it's available number two there is luckily for us an open data movement you know that was started on the Obama administration and hasn't stopped because you can't stop open movements allows people companies like ours to go leverage know whether it's John Hancock Carnegie Mellon or the new data coming out of you know California universities a lot of those people are opening up the data not every single piece is at the level we would like to see you know it's not zip plus 4 is mostly county level it's available the third innovation is what we have done with code but not it's not an innovation for the world right which is the give get model so we have said we will curate everything is available lie and boo cost anybody is used but they're for purposes and computations you want to enrich it every organization who gives code data will get more out of it so we have enabled a data exchange keep our far-off purple form and the open up the rail exchange that my clients use but you know we've opened up our data exchange part of our software platform and we have open source for this particular case a give get model but the more you give to it the more you get out of there and our first installations this was the first week that we have users of the platform you know the state of Nevada is using it there are no our state in North Carolina is using it already and we're trying to see the first asks for the gift get model to be used but that's the three ways you're trying to address the that's great and and and and so important you know in this again when this whole thing started I couldn't help but think of the Ford plant making airplanes and and Keiser making Liberty ships in in World War two but you know now this is a different battle but we have different tools and to your point luckily we have a lot of the things in place right and we have mobile phones and you know we can do zoom and well you know we can we can talk as we're talking now so I want to shift gears a little bit and just talk about digital transformation right we've been talking about this for ad nauseam and then and then suddenly right there's this light switch moment for people got to go home and work and people got to communicate via via online tools and you know kind of this talk and this slow movement of getting people to work from home kind of a little bit and digital transformation a little bit and data-driven decision making a little bit but now it's a light switch moment and you guys are involved in some really critical industries like healthcare like financial services when you kind of look at this not from a you know kind of business opportunity peer but really more of an opportunity for people to get over the hump and stop you can't push back anymore you have to jump in what are you kind of seeing in the marketplace Howard you know some of your customers dealing with this good bad and ugly there are two towers to start my response to you with using two of my favorite sayings that you know come to mind as we started the pandemic one is you know someone very smart said and I don't know who's been attributed to but a crisis is a terrible thing to waste so I do believe this move to restoring the world back to a natural state where there's not much fossil fuels being burnt and humans are not careful about their footprint but even if it's forced is letting us enjoy the earth in its glory which is interesting and I hope you don't waste an opportunity number one number two Warren Buffett came out and said that it's only when the tide goes out you realize who's swimming naked and this is a culmination of both those phenomenal phrases you know which is one this is the moment I do believe this is something that is deep both in the ability for us to realize the virtuosity of humanity as a society as social species as well as a reality check on what a business model looks like visa vie a presentation that you can put some fancy words on even what has been an 11-year boom cycle and blitzscale your way to disaster you know I have said publicly that this the peak of the cycle was when mr. Hoffman mr. Reid Hoffman wrote the book bit scaling so we should give him a lot of credit for calling the peak in the cycle so what we are seeing is a kind of coming together of those two of those two big trends crises is going to force industry as you've heard me say many for many years now do not just modernize what we have seen happen chef in the last few years or decades is modernization not transformation and they are different is the big difference as you know transformation is taking a business model pulling it apart understanding the economics that drive it and then not even reassembling it recreating how you can either recapture that value or recreate that value completely differently or by the way blow up the value create even more value that hasn't happened yet digital transformation you know data and analytics AI cloud have been modernizing trends for the last ten years not transformative trends in fact I've also gone and said publicly that today the very definition of technology transformation is run a sequel engine in the cloud and you get a big check off as a technology organization saying I'm good I've transformed how I look at data analytics I'm doing what I was doing on Prem in the cloud there's still sequel in the cloud you know there's a big a very successful company it has made a businessman out of it you don't need to talk about the company today but I think this becomes that moment where those business models truly truly get a chance to transform number one number two I think there's going to be less on the industry side on the new company side I think the the error of anointing winners by saying grow at all cost economics don't matter is fundamentally over I believe that the peak of that was the book let's called blitzscaling you know the markets always follow the peaks you know little later but you and I in our lifetimes will see the return to fundamentals fundamentals as you know never go out of fashion Jeff whether it's good conversations whether it's human values or its economic models if you do not have a par to being a profitable contributing member of society whether that is running a good balance sheet individually and not driven by debt or running a good balance sheet as a company you know we call it financial jurisprudence financial jurisprudence never goes out of fashion and the fact that even men we became the mythical animal which is not the point that we became a unicorn we were a profitable company three years ago and two years ago and four years ago and today and will end this year as a profitable company I think it's a very very nice moment for the world to realize that within the realm of digital transformation even the new companies that can leverage and push that trend forward can build profitable business models from it and if you don't it doesn't matter if you have a billion users as my economic professor told me selling a watermelon that you buy for a dollar or fifty cents even if you sell that a billion times you cannot make it up in volume I think those are two things that will fundamentally change the trend from modernization the transformation it is coming and this will be the moment when we look back and when you write a book about it that people say you know what now Jeff called it and now and the cry and the pandemic is what drove the economic jurisprudence as much as the social jurisprudence obvious on so many things here we can we're gonna be we're gonna go Joe Rogan we're gonna be here for four hours so hopefully hopefully you're in a comfortable chair but uh-huh but I don't I don't sit anymore I love standing on a DD the stand-up desk but I do the start of my version of your watermelon story was you know I dad a couple of you know kind of high-growth spend a lot of money raised a lot of money startups back in the day and I just know finally we were working so hard I'm Michael why don't we just go up to the street and sell dollars for 90 cents with a card table and a comfy chair maybe some iced tea and we'll drive revenue like there's nobody's business and lose less money than we're losing now not have to work so hard I mean it's so interesting I think you said everyone's kind of Punt you know kind of this pump the brakes moment as well growth at the ethic at the cost of everything else right there used to be a great concept called triple-line accounting right which is not just shareholder value to this to the sacrifice of everything else but also your customers and your employees and-and-and your community and being a good steward and a good participant in what's going on and I think that a lot of that got lost another you know to your point about pumping the brakes and the in the environment I mean we've been kind of entertaining on the oil side watching an unprecedented supply shock followed literally within days by an unprecedented demand shock but but the fact now that when everyone's not driving to work at 9:00 in the morning we actually have a lot more infrastructure than we thought and and you know kind of goes back to the old mob capacity planning issue but why are all these technology workers driving to work every morning at nine o'clock it means one thing if you're a service provider or you got to go work at a restaurant or you're you're carrying a truck full of tools but for people that just go sit on a laptop all day makes absolutely no sense and and I'd love your point that people are now you know seeing things a little bit slowed down you know that you can hear birds chirp you're not just stuck in traffic and into your point on the digital transformation right I mean there's been revolution and evolution and revolution people get killed and you know the fact that digital is not the same as physical but it's different had Ben Nelson on talking about the changes in education he had a great quote I've been using it for weeks now right that a car is not a is not a mechanical horse right it's really an opportunity to rethink the you know rethink the objective and design a new solution so it is a really historical moment I think it is it's real interesting that we're all going through it together as well right it's not like there quake in 89 or I was in Mount st. Helens and that blew up in in 1980 where you had kind of a population that was involved in the event now it's a global thing where were you in March 20 20 and we've all gone through this indeed together so hopefully it is a little bit of a more of a unifying factor in kind of the final thought since we're referencing great books and authors and quotes right as you've all know Harare and sapiens talked about what is culture right cultures is basically it's it's a narrative that we all have bought into it I find it so ironic that in the year 2020 that we always joke is 20/20 hindsight we quickly found out that everything we thought was suddenly wasn't and the fact that the global narrative changed literally within days you know really a lot of spearhead is right here in Santa Clara County with with dr. Sarah Cody shutting down groups of more than 150 people which is about four days before they went to the full shutdown it is a really interesting time but as you said you know if you're fortunate enough as we are to you know have a few bucks in the bank and have a business that can be digital which you can if you're in the sports business or the travel business the hotel business and restaurant business a lot of a lot of a lot of not not good stuff happening there but for those of us that can it is an opportunity to do this nice you know kind of a reset and use the powers that we've developed for recommendation engines for really a much more power but good for good and you're doing a lot more stuff too right with banking and in in healthcare telemedicine is one of my favorite things right we've been talking about telemedicine and electronic medicine for now well guess what now you have to cuz the hospitals are over are overflowing Jeff to your point three stories and you know then at some point I know you have you I will let you go you can let me go I can talk to you for four hours I can talk to you for but days my friend you know the three stories that there have been very relevant to me through this crisis I know one is first I think I guess in a way all are personal but the first one you know that I always like to remind people on there were business models built around allowing people to complain online and then using that as almost like a a stick to find a way to commercialize it and I look at that all of our friends I'm sure you have friends have lots of friend the restaurant is big and how much they are struggling right they are honest working the hardest thing to do in life as I've been told and I've witnessed through my friends is to run a restaurant the hours the effort you put into it making sure that what you produce this is not just edible but it's good quality is enjoyed by people is sanitary is the hard thing to do and there was yet there were all of these people you know who would not find in their heart and their minds for two seconds to go post a review if something wasn't right and be brutal in those reviews and if they were the same people were to look back now and think about how they assort the same souls then anything to be supportive for our restaurant workers you know it's easy to go and slam them online but this is our chance to let a part of the industry that we all depend on food right critical to humanity's success what have we done to support them as easy as it was for us to complain about them what have we done to support them and I truly hope and I believe they're coming out of it those business models don't work anymore and before we are ready to go on and online on our phones and complain about well it took time for the bread to come to my table we think twice how hard are they working right number one that's my first story I really hope you do tell me about that my second story is to your have you chained to baby with Mark my kids I'm sure as your kids get up every morning get dressed and launch you know their online version of a classroom do you think when they enter the workforce or when they go to college you and me are going to try and convince them to get in a oil burning combustion engine but by the way can't have current crash and breakdown and impact your health impact the environment and show up to work and they'll say what do you talk about are you talking about I can be effective I can learn virtually why can't I contribute virtually so I think there'll be a generation of the next class of you know contribute to society who are now raised to live in an environment where the choice of making sure we preserve the planet and yet contribute towards the growth of it is no longer a binary choice both can be done so I completely agree with you we have fundamentally changed how our kids when they grew up will go to work and contribute right my third story is the thing you said about how many industries are suffering we have clients you know in the we have health care customers we have banking customers you know we have whoever paying the bills like we are are doing everything they can to do right by society and then we have customers in the industry of travel hospitality and one of my most humbling moments Jeff there's one of the no sea level executives sent us an email early in this in this crisis and said this is a moment where a strong David can help AV Goliath and just reading that email had me very emotional because they're not very many moments that we get as corporations as businesses where we can be there for our customers when they ask us to be their father and if we as companies and help our customers our clients who area today are flying people are feeding people are taking care of their health and they're well if V in this moment and be there for them we we don't forget those moments you know those as humans have long-term memories right that was one of the kindest gentlest reminders to me that what was more important to me my co-founder Richard you know my leadership team every single person at Reseda that have tried very hard to build automations because as an automation company to automate complex human process so we can make humans do higher order activities in the moment when our customers asked us to contribute and be there for them I said yes they said yes you said yes and I hope I hope people don't forget that that unicorns aren't important there are mythical animals there's nothing all about profits there's nothing mythical about fortress balance sheet and there's nothing mythical about a strong business model that is built for sustainable growth not good at all cost and those are my three stories that you know bring me a lot of lot of calm in this tremendous moment of strife and and in the piece that wraps up all those is ultimately it's about relationships right people don't do business I mean companies don't do business with companies people do business with people and it's those relationships and and in strong relationships through the bad times which really set us up for when things start to come back I me as always it's I'm not gonna let it be three years to the next time I hear me pounding on your door great to catch up you know love to love to watch really your your culture building and your community engagement good luck I mean great success on the company but really that's one thing I think you really do a phenomenal job of just keeping this positive drumbeat you always have you always will and really appreciate you taking some time on a Friday to sit down with us well first of all thank you I wish I could tell you I just up to you but we celebrate formal Fridays that to Seder and that's what this is all so I want to end on a good on a positive bit of news I was gonna give you a demo of it but if you want to go to our website and look at what everything we're doing we have a survival kit around a data survival kit around kovat how am I using buzzwords you know a is let's not use that buzzword right now but in your in your lovely state but on my favorite places on the planet when we ran the algorithm on who is ready as per the government definition of opening up we have five counties that are ready to be open you know between Santa Clara to LA Sacramento Kern and San Francisco the metrics today the data today with our algorithm there are meta algorithm is saying that those five counties those five regions look like I've done a lot of positive activities if the country was to open under all the right circumstances those five look you know the first as we were men at on cream happy Earth Day a pleasure to see you so good to know your family is doing well and I hope we see we talk to each other soon thanks AVI great conversation with avi Mehta terrific guy thanks for watching everybody stay safe have a good weekend Jeff Rick checking out from the cube [Music]

>>Live from Washington, D C it's the cube covering Boomi world 19 how to bide booming. >>Welcome to the cube at Lisa Martin at Boomi world 19 in Washington DC and with John furrier and John and I are pleased to welcome to the cube Jason Maynard, the SVP of global field operations from NetSuite. Jason, welcome. Thanks for having me. It's great to be in D C and on the cube. It is. We were just talking about baseball, so we'll have to park that for a second and talk about some other sexy stuff besides baseball, ERP. So nets we, I saw you on stage this morning. You guys have been a partner of the first Alliance partner with Boomi for about 12 years. Thousands of joint customers. candy.com is one of them. Yep. They're going to be on later today. So I'm excited to have my afternoon sugar rush. Make sure he brings a big bag. You got it. So talk to us about you guys. We're also, I noticed Boomie's 2019 Alliance partner of the year. Lots of innovations going on. Give our audience a little bit of an overview of what NetSuite is doing with Boomi. >>Great. So Boomi is, has been one of our longest partners. I said I think we, we first inked the partnership in 2007 so it goes back 12, 13 years. Um, we, we, when we sell ERP, you always end up having to connect to a legacy on prem system, right? Or you may have to connect to new marketplaces to sell and so there's always need for integration. And so from day one, Boomi wanted to really kind of push the envelope work with cloud players. You know, when we started NetSuite 20 years ago, it was kinda crazy to put business applications on the internet and they'd been there from day one with us really on this journey. And so they've been a great partner to sort of help all those customers migrate and move their business to the cloud. >> You guys had success with Boomi on the customer front. >>Can you unpack that a little bit? Because the customer equation around data is interesting. You guys have turned this into an opportunity with nets. We talk about how that works. Yeah, I mean look EV every customer needs to get more insight out of their data. And you know, the ERP system is one of the major hubs in any organization, right? You've got a handful of system of records, right? And core financials is one of the main systems of record and inevitably every customer will have probably 1520 legacy data sources, right? That are going to be necessary for an ERP. And so for us, working with Boomi across not just the U S but across the globe with a lot of different international customers, it's a natural fit because we're not obviously going to be connecting with all of the systems that they're touching today. It brings a lot more value of data into NetSuite, which obviously then helps our customer out. >>So you guys were at, you said an early partner of Boomi back in 2007 when they were founded. We got to speak with Rick Nucci yesterday. So one of the interesting things that we talk about, and John even pointed out yesterday is you know, they took a big bet, Boomi dead way back then with building this architecture that's pretty unique to this day. This single instance, multi-tenant cloud application. Take us back to, because obviously NetSuite's been around longer, you a lot of choice, there are more iPods vendors out there. What is it about the way that Boomi is architected that is enabling your customers to achieve so much success but also really that you buy saw back in Oh seven I think this is something that's going to be a real big opportunity for NetSuite. >>You know, it's, it's, it's been an interesting ride because if you go back even to Oh seven and didn't even maybe eight or nine years ago, it was not a foregone conclusion with a lot of technology vendors that the world was going to shift to the cloud. Yeah, right. There were a lot of server huggers out there. There still are. They still want to hug this, they still want to hug the machine. Right. And so it's important, I think that we work with partners who have the same true North in terms of where we think that the technology is going. And I think that alignment, which is, you know, we're 100% in the cloud, always have been, always will be. Boomi shared that vision early on. So it was easier to make a bet then right, with a vendor who was going to have that commitment. >>And so that's been, to their credit, the vision that they've had for obviously years now. And I think that's what's helped them grow so quickly. And one of the things that you observed obviously is that the customers have choices, but the world software's changing, right? I mean cloud has changed the software development life cycle. I mean just in the past decade alone, the business of change, you still going to have the system of records. Okay. But with containers and Kubernetes and some of these cloud native opportunities, there's more flexibility in how people are deploying legacy and or core apps. Yeah. So they're not getting thrown away as everyone had predicted. So, I mean, there was some funded saying, well, everyone's going to move to the cloud and not really. Yeah, well I look at it, it's a good point because there's no packaged applications. They're not the entirety of the application market as you know. >>Right? Custom application development will never go away. You will always have, you know, things that are custom. People build apps on NetSuite, right? Things that are very close to ERP you'll build on the NetSuite platform. But there are things that are not, you know, native to our platform that need to connect to NetSuite. And there are customers that we share who are, have legacy COBOL applications for example. Right? And they may need to put a wrapper around that and get certain forms into NetSuite. So it really does run the gamut. And so it'll never be one thing, right? We just sort of, in the technology industry, we never go from, you know, 100 to zero in terms of what's deployed in the legacy. We sort of layer in compost technology. And I think that's what's happening. And so, you know, we'll replace certain systems. We go in and we pretty much always replace a an on prem system but there are a lot of on-prem technologies that a will never, never go away. >> I was digging around about Boomi and you guys net suite looking at some of the use cases. One thing that caught my eye was, you know, the growth startup for instance, might be born in the cloud. Yup. Never have an it department. Um, they have kind of a um, hacked together system of record at HR and ERP kind of things, but at some point they've got to grow and they hit a growth spurt and they just become rapid growth. Eventually goes public. You guys have had good success with Boomi in these kinds of startups. It's pretty normal. You've seen this before. Can you talk about that dynamic because at some point people got to start establishing formal, is this the systems applications? You're gonna need payroll, you're gonna need HR. I mean this is blocking and tackling. You guys have been successful there. >> Well, you know, we, we like to think about we can be the first system that you'll ever need and hopefully we'll be the last system that you'll ever need. Right? And what ends up happening is we've architected NetSuite to let you start small and then add more functionality as you grow. So you may start with just basic financials. You may add order management, move into full fledged ERP, maybe you're going to use our HR system down the road. And so we kind of, we kind of stairway a customer through their journey. Boomi does the same thing. Maybe you start with two connectors, right? You're just connecting two basic applications and, and that's sweet. And then you evolve into something more sophisticated, right? Where as you saw today and some of the technology demos where, you know, they're tapping into all sorts of different systems that are not even ERP or CRM, it's, you know, IOT and just all sorts of different insights that they can bring from the different technologies. >>Better together message is legit and this works. Yeah. You know, we look at, technology is all about coopertition these days, right? Is every vendor, right? In some way we overlap, you know, Boomie's owned by Dell, NetSuite's owned by Oracle, right? We're, we're all sort of inner inner locked in one way or another. But ultimately we have to work together because we share so many customers and so customers don't have the patience and nor should they for any of the sort of the, the vendor warfare. And I think that's the cool thing that's evolved with technology standards. It's easy for us to work together and we have to do it and we want to do it because it's what's the right thing for the customer. >>Let's talk about net suite as a launching pad for a lot of tech IPOs in the last few years. Give us your perspectives on what you guys started to recognize as a lot of these tech companies have kind of, that's why it just seems to me like net suite has been this sort of launchpad for that. Talk to us about what you've achieved there. >>Yeah, no, it's, we're, we're really humbled by the fact that more companies go, Poe tech companies go public on NetSuite than frankly you need any other ERP system. Um, you know, we help invent the industry. Early on, 20 years ago, Evan Goldberg and Larry had the famous four minute phone call to, you know, kind of crazily idea to put business apps on the web. Um, and so we've been, you know, at the forefront of this, but it's not just technology. It's, you know, we, we're a subscription business right from day one. Like we didn't sell a license with maintenance. We sold a subscription. So I think a lot of customers look at us and say, okay, they've been through the journey that we have. You know, we went public 12 years ago, you know, we past $1 billion in sales, you know, we got acquired. So the journey that we've been on, most of our customers are going to be on that journey in one form or another. >>We're going to, we've made acquisitions. Our customers make acquisitions, right? So we tried it and this was sort of the genius of what Evan and the team built is a system that can handle any business model. So whether you're selling time as a service, whether you're selling time or you're selling a subscription, you're selling a widget, maybe you're going to sell a widget as a service in the future. We can kind of handle any of the business models and most of the IPS are innovative companies that innovate not just with what they sell, but in how they sell it. >> Show about some stories from the field that you've seen out there. Anecdotally, share some turn situation. What are customers going through right now? Enterprises as they go through their journeys, they realize cloud's there. They got some stuff on premise is going to keep there. >>There's obviously certain reasons you're gonna run payroll in the cloud. You're going to have to have multitenancy is allows it news cases and clouds, not that straightforward. When you start thinking about having an enterprise and the hybrid mode of operations, what are some of the customers feeling? What's a, what's the mindset? What's their architecture look like? What are some of the examples? Can you share? Yeah. You know, I'd say three things come to mind. So first off, it's this business model innovation, right? The, the on prem systems tend to lock you into a model, right? And there's nothing, and when they were built, they were innovative 1520, 30 years ago. Most companies, business models have outgrown that legacy system. So they need to move off that to enable some new thing that they want to do. So that's a big driver. I think the other thing is, is globalization is here to stay. >>Um, you know, whether you're in the United States or you're in the UK or you're in Asia, right? We're one interconnected global economy. And so you may, you know, source from Asia, you may design in California, you may do nearshore assembly in Mexico and then you do omni-channel distribution. So you have to be global. And I would say the thing that's changed in the last 10 years is companies are being global from day one. It's not just something you add on five, seven, eight years down the road. You see companies designed for being global. And that I think those two things, business model, innovation global are our big catalyst right now. I mean we had, Oh one more thing real quick. So we have a Cuba alumni set on the cube data's the new software. Yeah. So if you've got a global business, data's critical as the data needs to be acted upon, you've got policy, you got regulations, regulatory issues, personal privacy stuff, company policy. >>As you have this global layer of data, making it available, addressable across multiple systems is a huge task. What's your view on that? Well it's, it's, it's an interesting question cause we think of it and kind of three pillars. It's we give you visibility, we give you control and then we give you the agility, right? So you've got to, first off, you've got to have visibility into the data, right? You need to know what's happening. Like how much did we sell in the Australian subsidiary yesterday, right? You need to have controls. If your CFO, you need to have global financial controls. You may have sold a lot in Australia. You've got to make sure you're spending too much. Right? How do you manage that? And then ultimately the agility is how do you make a decision on that? Right. And so that's those three things I think all play into it. >>And how does the consumerization effect impact it? Visibility, control, agility. Because as consumers we have this expectation whether you know in our personal lives we can get anything that we want within a couple of clicks. So when you're talking to a tech, whether it's a young tech company or even not a tech company like candy.com which is seems like a mixture. You and I were talking before of a number of different industries, all, all in one. How does, has NetSuite evolved to enable that consumer to go from their personal life to being able to interact with ERP next, struck the value from it in the ways that they want? Anywhere, anytime. >>Let's, let's be honest, for a second, ERP kinda got a dirty reputation. You know, in the nineties nobody loved their ERP implementations. Books had been written on this, right? ERP was like, it was like going like a bad trip to the dentist office in the 90s and that was sort of the catalyst for our company. But that's not enough just to be in the cloud. It's you have to make your user experience consumer grade, right? We always talk about enterprise grade. It's all the, reliability, scalability, all that kind of stuff. That's sort of a given, like you have to do that, but I think you have to, you have to adopt the consumer grade. So we spent a lot of time and we're doing a lot more and we're going to be rolling out some new stuff around user interface and just how easy is it to have a dashboard on your phone so that you can run your business from your smartphone versus actually having to be tethered to the desktop because we're all mobile, we're all traveling. You're a business owner, you're a CFO, you're CEO. You need to be connected. Maybe you're too connected. Maybe that's part, maybe we have screen-time problems. We do business. If we, if we can give our customers Screentime addiction to watch their business in real time, I guess that's a good thing. Right? And so we want to be able to make sure that they can have all that insight at their fingertips, whether they're in the office or at the beach. >>And speaking of insight, talk to us about brain yard. What that is, why you developed it and what it's enabling. >>Yeah. Thank you. That's like my, I was hoping you were gonna ask me. It's my secret, but not so secret anymore. Pet project. So one of the things being in the cloud, we have 18,000 customers, right? We have a single instance of NetSuite and so we've had the unique seat at the table to see all of these different companies grow in all these different industries. We evolved into selling by industry. So we have a retail version of software version of manufacturing, nonprofit, 1213 different industries. What we had in that is we had all these insights by industry. What is the right DSO number for a software company, right? What is the thing that a nonprofit needs to look at? And so we had trapped inside of NetSuite, all these brains sitting in all this information and PowerPoint and word docs and just everywhere. And so we decided to crack the hood open and literally open source that information and put it on the website. >>And so there's a subtle message here is that we have to do more than just sell bits. We, we're ultimately selling customer success or a business outcome, whatever you want to call it. So we need to transfer that knowledge to our customers so they can run their business better. So it's our investment back into the customer saying, Hey, you know what, if you're a software company and your DSO is at this level, you know, best in class is actually, you know, five days lower on a day sale, outstanding. How do you get your business to close that gap? And that's where we can really add value comms. People love comparables and best practices. You're essentially taking that heavy lifting work. It's giving it up there. It's benchmarking, it's analysis. You know, I was a former wall street analyst, so this one's near and dear to my heart, which is comparison, you know, how is this company doing versus that company? >>And so we have lots of data, um, that we've gleaned over the years. Lots of insights. So we kind of know what those best practices are. This is just the first phase of what we're doing. We're working with a lot of partners across the industry to give us some of their industry data so we kind of mash it up and come up with the insights. So it wasn't as an analyst, I'd love to get your thoughts real quick and take the, take the net suite hat off, put your industry participants hat on. Lot of wall street challenges around we worked, pulled their IPO, their GP gross profit was down. Other SAS businesses have huge margins. Their successful zooms public. There's a new formula developing in this cloud 2.0 world software world where the dynamic between classic software and software economics in the cloud are changing. What's your thoughts on this? >>If a startups out there and growing companies that are really looking to crack the code by at all costs and then monetize, get the margins that would, what's your, what's your analysis? No, it's, I, this is an area that I think a lot of companies raise too much, too much capital. Right? And they, we've been in this very unique environment over the last kind of eight or nine years where I'd argue a lot of startups who've been overfunded and when you have overfunding you chase growth at really no, you know, at without any limit on terms of the cost and what you see as you sort of distort the reality of what's happening in the business. And so I would argue that we've had, you know, zero in basically free money in terms of access to capital and we've lost track of some of the basics that you need to build a profitable, sustainable business. >>So, you know, when I was working on wall street, you couldn't go public, you know, if you were within say four quarters of cashflow break even, right? Those are some of the things that we used to have. But you've seen, you know, business fundamentals. Yeah, I need, and so what's happening right now? It's just a little bit of her. I think it's mean reversion. Honestly. I think you're seeing, you know, the public markets, you know, if you will veto some of the frothiness that's been in the private markets. And so this is, I think companies, some marketplaces do. That's what they, that's there. It's fantastic. It's a self correcting mechanism, right? I mean it's, you know, just cause you marked up your last round when you were private to a good Jillian dollars doesn't mean that the buy side on, you know, the pension fund is going to want to pay that and we work so you can't be high and run a business. You know, as we were saying, you know, trying, you know, God bless them, they're trying, but it's probably not the best practice I would not have. I would not recommend that. It's not a good look for wall street. How a good luck, you know, you can get on the Joe Rogan show there, knock yourself out. If you're a Ilan, you can do it. But you know, he's the, he's the only one we're going to let, don't know. >>Probably shouldn't be publicly. Air's too much unless you want something to laugh at and you know what, in this economy, I think we all need that. Jason, thank you for sharing with us what you're doing at NetSuite with Boomi, the insights that you guys are opening up with brain yard. So from brain yard, let's go back to the other yard that I promised. The baseball yard, your Dodger fan giants fan. Hats off. You guys are there. We are not. So I will say good luck to your team. We appreciate your time and what can I say, Bri? I'll give it to ya. All right, well it's been a pleasure talking to you and thank you for your time. Thanks for John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from booby world 19 thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a Cube conversation. >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in our Palto Alto studios today for a Cube conversation, kind of an interesting conversation around trying to connect big enterprises who are always trying to be innovative with small companies who are usually innovative but don't necessarily have the connections the big companies that have a little bit more resources and might be interested in the things that they're working on. Really doing that through podcasts, which is a really growing venue. It's been going on for a while, but we're seeing a big uptake in, I think, the consumption of podcasts, who's doing podcasts, the brands behind podcasts. So we're really happy to have them all the way from Texas. It's Erin Gregor and Syya Yasotornrat, the cofounders of Innovation Calling. So welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank for having us. >> Absolutely, so did I get the description right of Innovation Calling, or give everyone kind of your overview of what you guys are up to. >> Yeah, so Innovation Calling was developed with the fact of there's, being in Dallas, we've got a lot of large corporations with innovation labs. They're trying to stand out. They're trying to connect with great talent, but a lot of these people, everybody's got an innovation lab, and we've talked about this before. If you're in the Fortune 500, you are a tech company whether you like it or not. And so we just saw this potential to highlight these companies to be able to hopefully get talent. And then on the other side enterprise companies are trying to connect with start-ups, established start-ups, not ideas, but established and there's a lot to sift through. Hopefully the goal of the podcast is to highlight these companies and help with that sifting and help with the talent pool and really connecting the creators with the companies that are trying to create. >> What's kind of the objective of that matching 'cause clearly it's not a hiring, you're not a hiring service. >> Right. >> You're talking about companies, not people, so what's kind of the objective? What's kind of your best case if this connection works? >> So for us our best case scenario is, obviously, we are at the forefront of innovation with emerging technologies today. Obviously Silicon Valley has a lot of talent and a lot of corporations already in that space, but when you think of the mid-tier, second-tier cities like Dallas, for example, you don't have as many tech workers, but there's still need for that type of talent, right? >> Right. >> With podcasting as our venue and medium to communicate that, we also realized that there was a great potential for these corporations to leverage podcasting as a way to communicate and do their outreach. Again, we're on those mid-tier second-tier cities where you might not have the plethora of folks here in the Bay Area. >> Right, right, but even if they connect with that company, are you thinking that there's going to be some type of technical alliance, some type of partnership, an OEM agreement, or what again kind of if you're pitching this to the small company, what am I like "Yay! You're finally getting" Ya know I listened to your podcast the other day. You had a woman on from Erickson, and I'm building some 5G widget. What's kind of my anticipated outcome of participating and kind of following your funnel and connecting with Erickson? >> So we have a couple of different ways. First of all, we can through us, we've actually made a lot of handshakes, so that's what I love to do is help create the handshakes and we've done that personally. The other side is we are taking the next step and doing live events. So that podcast that you talked about was a series of women in tech leadership where it's not just a live podcasting event but a networking event. So we're really taking the next step in creating these opportunities that you can be in the same room more exclusive type room that we're putting together, a lot of invite only perspective, but helping to make those connections where I see somebody from Erickson is going to be there, I want to make sure and now I can actually be in person and make that happen too. >> Okay. Why podcast? How did you come to use podcast as kind of your medium? >> So I think there's been a tradition in the last five six years that podcast does have the potential to blow up. I think now in 2019 we've actually hit that threshold where there's actually consumer response and with enough studies what they've discovered is most podcast listeners are actually educated business professionals. They tend to lean towards technology, yet you don't see a lot of technology-branded podcasts. And so we looked at the market. A lot of hobbyist type and personal branded podcasts, but we think now is the right time for corporations to make the investment to understand that the medium of traditional advertising is actually evolving and podcast is leading that forefront. You're seeing a lot of huge investments. Actually here there's a hundred million dollar plus investments for the purpose of growing the podcast community. >> Is that for the infrastructure? Or is that for the actual talent and the community and the content generation? >> Yes, the answer is yes, it's everything. (laughter) A company that does a lot of production but builds the community too. >> So I listen to Malcolm Gladwell's all the time. We got to interview him at Quickbooks Connect a couple years ago. You know, really interesting podcast. There's guys like Joe Rogan and stuff that obviously got a ton of great pub when he had Elon Musk on, who smoked not really a joint but kind of a joint and that, but I'm curious on the business side, are there some kind of lighthouse podcasts that you guys see that you use either as an example for what you're trying to develop or as an example to show? I'm just going to keep using Erickson just 'cause it's top of mind from what I just watched. To show them to say hey this is the type of thing that you guys should be trying to do. Who are some of your favorites? >> I'm a big fan of Hackable McAfee that has rolled out. When you think of tech branding and that is what we do focus on is technology based corporations, we tend to lead toward speeds and feeds. That's kind of our, we're engineered background folks in general, right? But I thought Hackable does a great job of pulling in some technology but then using stories or using events of being hacked, for example, something that the audience can relate to. And it's a storytelling, and that's the story arc that I think in general we're helping corporations understand the value of storytelling. It's not just about a product. It's not just selling a cup per se, but the story around it. How good that cup of coffee will feel when you drink it or you know, the experience or memories that you have it evokes. >> So how far are you along on your journey? You have a number of podcasts up already on your site. Are you the first inning, the third inning, is this still kind of early days or where are you in your development of your concept and your company? >> Well, we have a couple of different components to our business, so the podcast has What I was telling you about too we have a network component, we've got a consulting services. Our goal for Innovation Calling was let's first prove the concept. Let's plug into a network. Let's make sure we We'll be the test case essentially, and we've proven that. So from that perspective of that component, we're hitting, we're almost at 100,000 downloads of our podcasts. You know, we're doing pretty well with that. And now as we build it's the next component, so we're bringing on a couple customers from a consulting basis and we help not just with the production but with the promotion. So you spoke earlier about, I always kind of look at if the tree falls in the forest but no one was there to hear it, did it actually happen? I feel that saying fits with a lot of corporate podcasts. They're out there, but no one knows they're out there. So are you going to continue spending that kind of money on production and time with your employees if you're not going to do anything to promote it. And no one knows it exists? So we help on both sides of that scale. >> So on your podcast, which has been the women in tech theme, is that kind of the theme you're going to continue, or is that kind of a launching thing and you're going to turn into other themes? >> That's just a component. So Innovation Calling, there's men on the actual podcast. But we started that specific series to yes talk about the technology perspective of women, but how did you get there? What's your story of growing? So that's just a segment of that podcast again to bring in to really theme the live events to help grow that community on a segment basis? So as that grows, our goal is to do a couple different other types of segments. We talked about a channel. The idea of that yesterday with a client, so we want to actually take the bigger part of Innovation Calling and niche it down bit by bit on the live event scale. >> And then on the event side, how often are you doing them? What's the format, how many people, frequency, and what's the format? >> Syya is ready to go. >> She's ready to go. >> Let me tell you, I'm ready to go. First off, there's wine and hors d'oeuvres, so if we can't wine you and dine you I suppose, but no, really again we're about building community first and foremost. The Dallas Fort Worth area is making great strides in the entrepreneurial side. Big investments to get major corporations to come in the area, so we think this is a great opportunity for these folk to come together. A lot of folks from outside of town, who are looking to build their network again because they've been relocated. And then, you know, our themes. Women in technology is our first theme because, quite frankly we're sort of biased a little bit towards that. >> Well it's a good theme. >> Got to help our people. >> But again it is a very casual format right now. It's interview-based. >> Is it a hundred people? Five hundred people? >> We actually started and we want it to be intimate. We want the value of the network to actually make genuine connections as opposed to if it gets too large, I feel like some individual might be left off the side. So we actually started off our very first one that sold out was forty people and we did not want more than that in a room. Quite frankly then it gets claustrophobic. >> What about frequency? >> Once a month. >> Once a month. >> Our goal is to keep the size about 75-100 of those, max out at 100, but make sure to Syya's point keep them at an intimate scale. >> What about geography? Obviously you guys are based out of Dallas Fort Worth area. You're here in Silicon Valley. What's kind of your geographic plan? How do you see this kind of evolving? >> Absolutely. We would love to share this across the United States. Again we want to make sure Dallas is viable, proves a point. It is a second-tier city versus something like the Silicon Valley area or Chicago, New York, etc. We are not trying to create a brand new women in technology group, if you will. We're actually working in collaboration with existing women technology groups. We're just simply leveraging the networking opportunity through live podcasting. Again, growing the podcast medium. >> Yeah, I would say by early 2020 our goal is to be in, to come out here and to be able to have an audience to do a live event. We actually had drinks with someone last night about that collaboration, so we'd love to grow it on a perspective and be able to do it in different communities 'cause I've been podcasting for about five years through other businesses and the live event, it's just really. I mean you know you do live interviews. >> I do a lot of live events. >> There's just something special about that connection and then being there live to do the interview. It's a really fun format. >> Right. So do you have any upcoming guests you can plug or share with us today on your next couple podcasts? >> Our next event is actually April 9th. (laughter) (mumbles) April 9th and we're going to have Crystal Christensen, VP of Tech Support at SonicWall. We're very excited to have her onboard. We're still in confirmation, but we're going to be expecting folks from SalesForce, HPE, and Facebook for our next events. >> Okay, great. Where do people go to listen to the podcasts? >> Innovationcalling.com >> All right. Well Syya, Erin, thanks for stopping by. Hopefully you have a good successful couple of days in Silicon Valley and safe travels home. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much for having us, Jeff. Appreciate it. >> She's Erin, she's Syya, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We're at our Palo Alto studios for our Cube conversation. Thanks for watching. We'll catch ya next time. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, CUBE nation, I'm Sam Kahane. Thanks for watching the CUBE. Due to popular demand from the community, I will be interviewing the legendary Stu Miniman, here today. He is S-T-U on Twitter. Stu and I are going to be digging in to the 2019 predictions, and also recapping 2018 for you here. So, Stu, let's get into it a little bit. 2018, can you set the stage? How many events did you go to? How many interviews did you conduct? >> Boy, Sam, it's tough to look back. We did so much with the CUBE this year. I, personally, did over 20 shows, and somewhere between 400 and 450 interviews, out of, we as a team did over a 100 shows, over 2000 interviews. So, really great to be in the community, and immerse ourselves, drink from the fire hose, and some of the data. (laughs) >> So, over 400 interviews this year, that's amazing. What about some of the key learnings from 2018? Yeah, Sam,my premise when I'm going out is, how are we maturing? My background, as you know, Sam, I'm an infrastructure guy. My early training was in networking. I worked on virtualization, and I've been riding this wave of cloud for about the last 10 years. So, about two years ago, it was, software companies, how are they living in these public clouds? Amazon, of course, the dominant player in the marketplace, but we know it will be a multi-cloud world. And the update, for 2018, is we've gone from, how do I live in those public clouds, to how are we maturing? We call it hybrid clouds, or multi-cloud, but living between these worlds. We saw the rise in Kubernetes, as a piece of it, but customers have lots of environments, and how they get their arms around that, is a serious challenge out there, today. So, how are the suppliers and communities, and the systems integration, helping customers with this really challenging new environment, that we have today. >> I'd love to hear any OMG moments from you. What surprised you the most this year? >> It's interesting, when I wanna think about some of the big moves in the industry, I mean, we had the largest software acquisition in tech history. IBM, the company you used to work for, Sam, buying Red Hat, a company I've worked with, for about 20 years, for 34 billion dollars. I mean, Red Hat has been the poster child for open source, and the exemplar of that. It was something that was like, wow, this is a big deal. We've been talking for a long time, how important developers are, and how important open source is, and there's nothing like seeing Big Blue, a 107-year-old company, putting in huge dollars, to really, not just validate, cause IBM's been working in open source, working with Linux for a long time, but how important this is to the future. And that sits right at that core of that multi-cloud world. Red Hat wants to position itself to live in a lot of those environments, not just for Linux, but the Middleware, Kubernetes is a big play. We saw a number of acquisitions in the space there. Red Hat bought CoreOS for $250 million. VMware bought Heptio, and was kind of surprised, at the sticker shock, $550 million. Great team, we know the Heptio team well. We talked to them, some of the core people, back when they were at Google. But, some big dollars are being thrown around, in this space, and, as you said, the big one in the world is Amazon. One of the stories that everybody tracked all year was the whole hq2 thing. It kind of struck me as funny, as Amazon is in Seattle. I actually got to visit Seattle, for the first time, this year, and somebody told me, if you look at the top 50 companies that have employees in Seattle, of course, Amazon is number one, but you need to take number two through 43, and add them together, to make them as big as Amazon. Here in Boston, there's a new facility going up, with 5,000 employees. I know they're going to have 25,000 in Long Island City, right in the Queens, in New York City, as well as Crystal City, right outside of DC, 25,000. But, the realization is that, of course, Amazon's going to have data centers, in pretty much every country, and they're going to have employees all around the world. This doesn't just stay to the US, but Amazon, overall. So, Amazon, just a massive employer. I know so many people who have joined them. (laughs) Some that have left them. But, almost everything that I talk about, tends to come back to Amazon, and what there are doing, or how people are trying to compete, or live in that ecosystem. >> You're always talking to the community. What are some of the hottest topics you're hearing out there? >> So, living in this new world, how are we dealing with developers? A story that I really liked, my networking background, the Cisco DevNet team, led by Suzie Wee, is a really phenomenal example, and one of my favorite interviews of the year. I actually got to talk to Suzie twice this year. We've known her for many years. She got promoted to be a Senior Vice President, which is a great validation, but what she built is a community from the ground up. It took about four years to build this platform, and it's not about, "Oh, we have some products, and developers love it.", but it's the marketplace that they live in, really do have builders there. It's the most exciting piece of what's happening at Cisco. My first show for 2019 will be back at Cisco, live in Barcelona, and Cisco going through this massive transformation, to be the dominant networking company. When they talk about their future, it is as a software company. That actually, it blew my mind, Sam. You know, Cisco is the networking company. When they say, "When you think of us, "five to ten years from now, "you won't think of us as a networking company. "You'll think of us as a software company." That's massive. They were one of the four horsemen of the internet era. And, if Cisco is making that change, everything changes. IBM, people said if they don't make this move for Red Hat, is there danger in the future? So, everything is changing so fast, it is one of the things that everybody tries to sort out and deal with. I've got some thoughts on that, which I'm sure we'll get to later on. >> (laughs) As is Suzie Wee one of your top interviews of 2018, could you give your top three interviews? >> First of all, my favorite, Sam, is always when I get to talk to the practitioners. A few of the practitioners I love talking to, at the Nutanix show in New Orleans this year, I talked to Vijay Luthra, with Northern Trust. My co-host of the show was Keith Townsend. Keith, Chicago guy, said, "Northern Trust is one "of the most conservative financial companies", and they are all-in on containerization, modernized their application. It is great to see a financial company that is driving that kind of change. That's kind of a theme I think you'll see, Sam. Another, one, was actually funny enough, Another Nutanix show, at London, had the Manchester City Council. So, the government, what they're doing, how they're driving change, what they're doing with their digital transformation, how they're thinking of IOT. Some of my favorite interviews I've done the last few years, have been in the government, because you don't think of government as innovating, but, they're usually resource-constrained. They have a lot of constituencies, and therefore, they need to do this. The Amazon public sector show was super-impressive. Everything from, I interviewed a person from the White House Historical Society. They brought on Jackie O's original guidebook, of being able to tour the White House. So, some really cool human interest, but it's all a digital platform on Amazon. What Amazon is doing in all of the industry-specific areas, is really impressive. Some of these smaller shows that we've done, are super-impressive. Another small show, that really impressed me, is UiPath, robotic process automation, or RPA, been called the gateway drug to AI, really phenomenal. I've got some background in operations, and one of the users on the program was talking about how you could get that process to somewhere around 97 to 98% compliance, and standardize, but when they put in RPA, they get it to a full six sigma, which is like 99.999%, and usually, that's something that just humans can't do. They can't just take the variation out of a process, with people involved. And, this has been the promise of automation, and it's a theme. One of my favorite questions, this year, has been, we've been talking about things like automation, and intelligence in systems, for decades, but, now, with the advent of AI machine learning, we can argue whether these things are actually artificial intelligence, in what they are learning, but the programming and learning models, that can be set up and trained, and what they can do on their own, are super-impressive, and really poised to take the industry to the next level. >> So, I wanna fast forward to 2019, but before we do so, anything else that people need to know about 2018? >> 2018, Sam, it's this hybrid multi-cloud world. The relationship that I think we spend the most time talking about, is we talked a lot about Amazon, but, VMware. VMware now has over 600,000 customers, and that partnership with VMware is really interesting. The warning, of course, is that Amazon is learning a lot from Vmware, When we joke with my friends, we say, "Okay, you've learned a lot from them means that "maybe I don't need them in the long term." But in the short term, great move for VMware, where they've solidified their position with customers. Customers feel happy as to where they live, in that multi-cloud environment, and I guess we throw out these terms like hybrid, and multi, and things like that, but when I talk to users, they're just figuring out their digital transformation. They're worried about their business. Yes, they're doing cloud, so sassify what you can, put in the public cloud what makes sense, and modernize. Beware of lift and shift, it's really not the answer. It could be a piece of the overall puzzle, to be able to modernize and pull things apart. An area, I always try to keep ahead of what the next bleeding-edge thing is, Sam. A thing I've been looking at, deeply, the last two years, has been serverless. Serverless is phenomenal. It could just disrupt everything we're talking about, and, Amazon, of course, has the lead there. So, it was kind of an undercurrent discussion at the KubeCon Show, that we were just at. Final thing, things are changing all the time, Sam, and it is impossible for anybody to keep up on all of it. I get the chance to talk to some of the most brilliant people, at some of the most amazing companies, and even those, you know, the PhD's, the people inventing stuff, they're like, "I can't keep up with what's going on at my company, "let alone what's going on in the industry." So, that's the wrong thing. Of course, one of the things we helped to do, is to extract the signal from the noise, help people distill that. We put it into video, we put it into articles, we put it into podcasts, to help you understand some of the basics, and where you might wanna go to learn more. So, we're all swimming in this. You know, the only constant, Sam, in the industry is change. >> Absolutely. (laughing in unison) >> So, things are changing. The whole landscape, as you said, is changing. Going into 2019, what should people expect? Any predictions from you? Any big mergers and acquisitions you might see? >> It's amazing, Sam. The analogy I always use is, when you have the hundred year flood, you always say, "Oh gosh, we got through it, "and we should be okay." No, no, no, the concern is, if you have the hundred year flood, or the big earthquake, the chances are that you're going to have maybe something of the same magnitude, might even be more or less, but rather soon. A couple of years ago, Dell bought EMC, largest acquisition in tech history. We spent a lot of time analyzing it. By the way, Dell's gonna go public, December 28. Interesting move, billions of dollars. As Larry Ellison said, "Michael Dell, "he's no dummy when it comes to money.' He is going to make, personally, billions of dollars off of this transaction, and, overall, looks good for the Dell technologies family, as they're doing. So, that acquisition, the Red Hat acquisition, yeah, we're probably gonna see a 10-to-20 billion dollar acquisition this year. I'm not sure who it is. There's a lot of tech IPOs on the horizon. The data protection space is one that we've kept a close eye on. From what I hear, Zeam, who does over a billion dollars a year, not looking to go public. Rubrik, on the other hand, somewhere in the north of 200 million dollars worth of revenue, I kind of remember 200, 250 in run rate, right now, likely going to go public in 2019. Could somebody sweep in, and buy them before they go public? Absolutely. Now, I don't think Rubrik's looking to be acquired. In that space, you've got Rubrik, you've got Cohesity, you've got a whole lot of players, that it has been a little bit frothy, I guess you'd say. But, customers are looking for a change in how they're doing things, because their environments are changing. They've got lots of stuff in sass, gotta protect that data. They've got things all over the cloud, and that data issue is core. When we actually did our predictions for 2018, data was at the center of everything, when I talked about Wikibon. It was just talking to Peter Burris and David Floyer, and they said there is some hesitancy in the enterprise, like, I'm using Salesforce, I'm using Workday I'm using ServiceNow. We hear all the things about Facebook giving my data away, Google, maybe the wrong people own data, there's that concern I want to pull things back. I always bristle a little bit, when you talk about things like repatriation, and "I'm not gonna trust the cloud." Look, the public clouds are more secure, than my data centers are in general, and they're changing and updating much faster. One of the biggest things we have, in IT, is that I put something in, and making changes is tough. Change, as we said, is the only thing constant. It was something I wrote about. Red Hat, actually, is a company that has dealt with a lot of change. Anybody that sells anything with Linux, or Kubernetes, there are so many changes happening, on not only weekly, but a daily basis, that they help bring a little bit of order, and adult supervision, to what most people would say is chaos out there. That's the kind of thing we need more in the industry, is I need to be able to manage that change. A line I've used many times is, you don't go into a company and say, "Hey, what version of Azure are you running?" You're running whatever Microsoft says is the latest and greatest. You don't have to worry about Patch Tuesday, or 08. I've got that things that's gonna slow down my system for awhile. Microsoft needs to make that invisible to me. They do make that thing invisible to me. So does Amazon, so does Google. >> What's your number one company to watch, this upcoming year. Is it Amazon, Sam? Look, Amazon is the company at the center of it all. Their ecosystem is amazing. While Amazon adds more in revenue, than the number two infrastructure player does in revenue. So, look, in the cloud space, it is not only Amazon's world. There definitely is a multi-cloud world. I went to the Microsoft show for the first time, this year, and Microsoft's super-impressive. They focus on your business applications, and their customers love it. Office 365 really helped move everybody towards sass, in a big way, and it's a big service industry. Microsoft's been a phenomenal turnaround story, the last couple of years. Definitely want to dig in more with that ecosystem, in 2019 and beyond. But, Amazon, you know, we could do more shows of the CUBE, in 2019, than we did our first couple of years. They have, of course, Amazon re:Invent, our biggest show of the year, but their second year, it's about 20 shows, that they do, and we're increasing those. I've been to the New York City Summit, and the San Francisco Summit. I've already mentioned their Public Sector Summit. Really, really, really good ecosystems, phenomenal users, and I already told you how I feel about talking to users. It's great to hear what they're doing, and those customers are moving things around. Google, love doing the Google show. We'll be back there in April. Diane Greene is one of the big guests of the year, for us this year. I was sorry to miss it in person, 'cause I actually have some background. I worked with Diane. Back before EMC bought VMware. I had the pleasure of working with Vmware, when they were, like, a hundred person company. Sam, one of the things, I look back at my career, and I'm still a little bit agog. I mean, I was in my mid-20s, working in this little company, of about 100 people, signed an NDA, started working with them, and that's VMware, with 600,000 customers. I've watched their ascendancy. It's been one of the pleasures of my career. There's small ones, heck. Nutanix I've mentioned a couple of times. I started working them when they were real small. They have over a billion in revenue. New Cure, since the early days. Some companies have done really well. The cloud is really the center of gravity of what I watch. Edge computing we got into a bit. I'm surprised we got almost 20 minutes into this conversation, without mentioning it. That, the whole IOT space, and edge computing, really interesting. We did a fun show with PTC, here in Boston. Got to talk to the father of AI, the father of virtual reality. It's like all these technologies, many of which have been bouncing around for a couple of decades. How are they gonna become real? We've got a fun virtual reality place right next door. The guy running the cameras for us is a huge VR enthusiast. How much will those take the next step? And, how much are things stalling out? I worry, was having conversations. Autonomous vehicles, we're even looking at the space. Been talking about it. Will it really start to accelerate? Or have we hit road blocks, and it's gonna get delayed. Some of these are technologies, some of these are policies in place, in governments and the like, and that's still one of the things that slows down crowded options. You know, GDPR was the big discussion, leading into the beginning of 2018. Now, we barely talk about it. There's more regulations coming, in California and the like, but we do need to worry about some of those macro-economical and political things that sometimes get in the way, of some of the technology pieces. >> I'd love to put something out into the universe, here. If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be? Let's see if we can make it happen. It's amazing to me, Sam, some of the interviews we've done. I got a one-on-one with Michael Dell this year. It was phenomenal, Michael was one. It took us about three or four years before we got Michael on the program, the first time. Now, we have him two or three times a year. Really, to get to talk to him. There is the founder culture John Furrier always talks about. Some of these founders are very different. Michael, amazing, got to speak to him a couple of times. There's something that makes him special, and there's a reason why he's a billionaire, and he's done very well for himself. So, that was one. Furrier also interviewed John Chambers, who is one of the big gets I was looking at. I was jealous that I wasn't able to get there. I got to interview one of my favorite authors this year, Walter Isaacson, at the shows. When I look at, Elon Musk, of course, as a technologist, is, I'm amazed. I read his bio, I've heard some phenomenal interviews with him. Kara Swisher did a phenomenal sit-down on her podcast with him. Even the 60 Minutes interview was decent this year. >> The Joe Rogan one was great >> Yeah, so, you'd want to be able to sit down. I wouldn't expect Elon to be a 15-minute, rapid-fire conversation, like we usually have. But, we do some longer forms, sit down. So he would be one. Andrew Jassy, we've interviewed a number of times now. Phenomenal. We've got to get Bezos on the program. Some of the big tech players out there. Look, Larry Ellison's another one that we haven't had on the program. We've had Mark Hurd on the program, We've had lots of the Oracle executives. Oracle's one that you don't count out. They still have so many customers, and have strong power in new issues, So there are some big names. I do love some of the authors, that we've had on the program, some thought leaders in the space. Every time we go to a show, it's like, I was a little disappointed I didn't get to interview Jane Goodall, when she was at a show. Things like that. So, we ask, and never know when you can get 'em. A lot of times, it's individual stories of the users, which are phenomenal, and there's just thousands of good stories. That's why we go to some small shows, and make sure we always have some editorial coverage. So that, if their customers are comfortable sharing their story, that's the foundation our research was founded on. Peers sharing with their peers. Some of the most powerful stories of change, and taking advantage of new technologies, and really transforming, not just business, but health care and finance, and government. There's so much opportunity for innovation, and drivers in the marketplace today. >> Stu, I love it. Thanks for wrapping up 2018 for us, and giving us the predictions. CUBE nation, you heard it here. We gotta get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison on the CUBE this year. We could use your help. Stu, thank you, and CUBE nation, thank you for watching. (electronic techno music)